Of course! Melio thought. That’s how they fly. They swim the air!
The fish careened over the deck. They slipped between the sails. Most flew with amazing precision, even snapping their wings against their sides to cut through narrow gaps. Their bodies were slim splinters, thick around as a man’s leg and, fins included, a little longer. They were as dangerous in flight as javelins, striped down the side with one slash of violet. One sliced Kartholome’s shoulder through his shirt, several smashed so hard against structures on the boat that they skidded across the deck, broken. A hundred, it seemed, tried to cut strands of Melio’s curly hair as they passed.
Melio would never forget the mad way he and Kartholome and Geena dashed around on deck, fishing. They tossed nets up over their heads, and then fell to the deck, clutching the ropes as the fish’s force pulled them. He would never forget that, try as he might, he could not say he saw even one of them jump from the water or fall into it. They just flew. Nor would he forget the taste of them afterward, when the crew gathered snug in the cabin, getting stupid on ale. Roasted over an open flame, the fish needed nothing but salt to flavor them. “Like tuna,” he declared, and Geena had added, “If tunas could fly and were a white fish that tasted like sea air after a storm on an island of lemon trees.”
She had it right, he had to admit.
A nd then there was the morning two weeks from land, nothing around them but endless ocean, when the sails suddenly appeared. Twenty or thirty of them, diaphanous white triangles blown by the same steady wind the Slipfin hitched. They came over the horizon behind them midmorning, and by the midafternoon they cruised right by the league clipper. But the sails were nothing human made. They trailed beneath them long tendrils of aquatic life, ribbons of yellow and blue, splattered with sparkles along the entire long length of them. Melio could not shake the feeling that each shimmer was an individual creature attached to the tendrils, passengers that watched him as they flapped in the current, as casual as so many Agnates passing them in their pleasure crafts.
There was the doubled sky at night. Above, the constellations he knew. Below, beneath the undulations of the waves, another universe of glowing orbs. They were not reflections from the sky, as he thought at first, but shone with their light from somewhere far below. He knew that the stars below were living creatures, which made him wonder if the stars in the sky might be likewise. Creatures of some vast ocean he could not comprehend.
And there were the deep whales. He had heard tales of them, but seeing them was another thing. They appeared in a pod off a way to starboard. They looked, from the middle distance, like a series of rounded granite boulders, save that they bobbed with the seas. One broke off from the rest, dipped below the surface a moment, and then rose and came toward them. The enormous wedge of its head pushed a billow of water before it. Just before its nose would have hit the Slipfin, the whale dove. Its tailfins stretched wider than the Slipfin was long. When it submerged, the surge of water it pulled down tilted the boat with it. The upsurge of water from the fin sent a wave over the boat, drenching all on board. Melio clutched a safety rope, laughing uncontrollably at the bizarre beauty of it. He was starting to understand the way Geena lived.
The way Dariel must have lived when he grew to adulthood among these people.
The trials to come should have daunted him, but for some reason they did not. It was not that he thought they would pass through the Range, survive a run-in with the sea wolves, or possibly find one young prince in a foreign land that he knew nothing of. Just the opposite. It was the fact these things seemed so out of the reach for four small people in a relatively small boat that heartened him. They should fail. They would fail. There was no way they could not fail. With that established, he could go forward without struggling with expectations.
D ead calm. The third week in. Just as far from land as was possible. Near where the Range might well have begun. Instead of that roaring tumult-stillness. It just came upon them while nobody was paying attention. Melio did not feel the boat’s constant rocking stop; he just realized that it had when he awoke that morning. It was not even the lack of movement that woke him. It was the silence. No creaking of boards, no murmuring off somewhere in the ship’s innards, no whistle of wind or slop of water against the hull, no tinkling from the bells high up on the mainmast.
They all gathered on deck and stared at the breezeless sky and the mirror-flat surface of the water and the ghosts of limp cloths where the sails should have been. The Slipfin sat as if stuck in a sea of glass.
“When did this happen?” Clytus asked.
“Didn’t you notice?” Geena responded.
“Nah. I was deciphering what I could from league manuals in the bridge back room. I set the course and stepped away from the wheel, stuck my nose in the books. Don’t know how long for, but when I looked up this calm was on us. Couldn’t have been more than a few minutes,” he said, but none of the confidence of the statement was in the voice making it.
Geena jumped up onto the port railing. She stood there, balanced above the water. For a moment, she looked like she was going to leap down onto the hard surface of the once-was-water and go running across it, playing. A few seconds standing there, however, took the jauntiness out of her posture. “Passing strange,” she whispered as she climbed back down to the deck.
Kartholome had heard of a league fleet becalmed for nearly a month during an early crossing, but that had happened so long ago the tale had the feel of legend. He seemed more disbelieving than any of them. “I’ve never seen a stillness like this,” he said. “It isn’t possible. We’re supposed to be in the Range now. The Range of the Gray Slopes, for the love of light. This isn’t possible!”
“Shhhh,” Geena said, and Melio was glad she did. A voice should not, he felt, speak loudly into such stillness.
For two days the impossible continued. No wind stirred. No ripples moved on the surface. No fish darted in the water, or flew above it, or sailed across it. No motions or sounds in all the world other than the ones they themselves made. The silence in particular grew in intensity. Melio had never experienced a silence like this one before. The lack of noise made them all shy of making any sounds. Each scuffing of a foot on the deck or the thrumming of fingers on the railing, a cough at night or a clearing of a throat: they all seemed like an affront to the emptiness that was the world. A sign that would betray their existence to something that should not know of their existence. They spoke only when they had to, and then only in whispers. Melio always felt ill at ease afterward.
On the third morning a fin broke the surface-the dorsal of a gap-mouthed shark. It moved with an eerie slowness, as if it worked at a different pace from the rest of the world. It seemed to carve not through water but through the thick syrup the water had congealed into. Watching the shark for the better part of an afternoon, Melio felt the Slipfin to be akin to whatever tiny creatures that behemoth sucked into its gaping maw. Just as vulnerable. Just as still in the water, waiting for the mouth that would engulf them, boat and all.
By the third night they had had enough of it. Gathered together in the captain’s cabin, they ate their fill from the rich stores. More to the point, they got drunk. They filled the small room with more noise than they had heard in days. Awkward, forced humor. Boisterousness with a slightly mad edge. Kartholome drank his warm ale from a languid stretch of glass that no doubt was intended for finer things. Geena raided the league’s stores. She shared around a flask of something with an aniseed tang. None of them could name the liquor in it, but it went down.